Some Thoughts about the Cheddar Man, Ray Kurzweil, and Jesus

March 2, 2012April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ 3 Comments

In 1903, a human skeleton was discovered in Gough’s Cave in the Cheddar Gorge of Somerset, England. It was an unusual skeleton, very old and bearing marks that suggested it had belonged to a man who had died from a blow to his head. Scientists determined that this wasn’t a recent murder victim at all. In fact, the skeleton belonged to the most ancient murder victim in the British Isles, a man who had lived and died seven thousand years before the birth of Christ. The body of this ancient man was positioned near a cave that was full of animal bones. Presumably it had once been his store house. The man’s bones bore the same kinds of marks as those of the animals, suggesting that the flesh had been stripped from them in the same manner as theirs had been. In other words, he was killed, butchered, and eaten by other human beings. He was about 23 years old when he died.

Ninth thousand years have passed since the murder of the Cheddar Man, as this skeleton came to be known. In those nine millennia, human life has changed significantly. There are very few cannibals left in the world. It is rare for someone to die before they are twenty-three years old. We don’t know what kind of social system the Cheddar Man lived in, but it’s safe to assume that his day to day life and his interactions with other people were very, very different from our own. This paleolithic man was a hunter gatherer, who had never heard of hunting, who moved about the land following grazing animals and collecting nuts and berries, rarely running into other people who weren’t part of his little family group. The technology he used was entirely different from our own. He used stone tools and bits of hide and sticks to catch his pray and make his clothes and carve out his dwellings. Physiologically he was different, shorter than we are, less well nourished. The resemblance between his humanity and ours was minimal.

In terms of time, Jesus is much more our contemporary than he was the Cheddar Man’s contemporary, but in terms of technology he would find the Cheddar Man understandable and us incomprehensible. When Jesus appeared two thousand years ago, he told the disciples that he was the Son of Man. He was claiming his humanity, stating that he had come to show us what God is like, but also to show us what a true and perfect human being is like. True humanity consisted of service to others (Mark 10:45), forgiveness (Mark 2:10), bringing justice to others (Luke 18:8), and giving himself up as a ransom for other people (Matthew 20:28). That, for a Christian, is what it means to be human, and it’s important for us to remember it, because so much in our humanity is changing.

Let’s consider, for a moment, changes within our own lifetimes. I just recently read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s book The Bronze Pen to my daughter. It’s protagonist, Audrey Abbott, finds herself isolated from her friends and classmates because her father has a heart condition that requires bypass surgery. Now, this book is set during my own childhood, in the 1970s. Bypass surgery was still experimental surgery, and in order for Audrey’s father to get an operation he has to find the rare doctor who was willing to do it, and go to San Francisco for a week for surgery and recovery. So he malingers, always ill and sad and not expecting to live much longer, and Audrey rushes home from school every day so that he won’t be alone while her mother works an afternoon shift at a bank. These days, this scenario couldn’t really drive a plot. Bypass surgery is routine, and can be performed almost anywhere. People still do linger in the grasp of malign and seemingly incurable illnesses, but the numbers who do are much, much fewer. Our attitude to health has, correspondingly, changed. We expect modern medicine to be able to fix us, no matter what our illness is. We don’t expect death to reach out and grab us without a fight. And I think this changes our inward, spiritual attitudes. We are less complacent with the world, less accepting of fate. We’ve lost a sense of the accidental. When an accident happens, when someone dies, our first instinct is to try to determine who is to blame. Our expectations as human beings have changed. It used to be that we expected the universe to control us. Now we expect to control the universe.

These physical, spiritual and mental changes to our humanity are only going to accelerate as history moves forward. In 2005, Ray Kurzweil published a book called The Singularity is Near. In it, he predicts all sorts of wacky changes for the future of humanity. He believes that human beings and computers are going to merge at some point in the near future to make a new, augmented humanity. Software will be able to mimic human intelligence by the mid-2020s, and then it will keep expanding, getting smarter and smarter. Tiny little robots called nanobots with travel inside the capillaries of our brain and help us merge with machine intelligence. More than that, they will manipulate our very cells and molecules, helping to heal all of the incurable diseases and even reversing human aging. They’ll create virtual realities from inside our own nervous systems, telling our eyes that they’re seeing things that aren’t really there, and our ears that we’re hearing things that aren’t really there. And there will be little nanobots floating in the air all around us, that will join together and form themselves into foglets, swarms of tiny robots that can alter sound waves and light waves and create virtual realities in the world outside of our nervous systems as well. Supposedly, our human-machine intelligence will just keep growing and growing until, Kurzweil says, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.”

This reminds me of nothing so much as the scientific enthusiasts of the mid-19th century, particularly Auguste Comte. Comte was the founder of positivism, which held that science would come to replace all other systems of thought. He was so sure of science and rationality’s ascendency over the human spirit that he wrote to the Pope, suggesting that the Catholic Church consider folding itself into his new religion of science (you can read about this in Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism). He saw the technological potentials of the human race and forgot about our seemingly unending moral limitations. In the following century, after the holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb, it became much harder to believe that science represented human salvation.

I don’t know if Ray Kurzweil is right (although futurists rarely are), but even if he is, I have doubts that the future he describes is actually good. He assumes that machines will treat us nicely, and that we’ll treat machines nicely, and that human-machine intelligences will treat each other nicely. He forgets that we’ve never really learned the thing that Jesus came to teach us. We’re all ready to become extra-human, but we’ve never learned to be truly human. The truth is that the Cheddar Man isn’t that different from us. In 1997, scientists in England sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the Cheddar Man. They found that they could trace patterns in his DNA to modern day people. To one particular person, in fact, a history teacher named Adrian Targett who was living in Cheddar Village. Here were two men, relatives separated by nearly 9,000 years, who lived within a few miles of each other. Now I’m sure that Adrian Targett is a perfectly nice person, but he is still part of fallen humanity, as am I, as are you, as was the Cheddar man, so many millennia ago.

What does it profit us to gain the whole world, or the whole universe, and forfeit our lives? Before we go rushing ahead into the future, we need to learn how to be of service, how to forgive others, how to bring justice to others, and how to give ourselves as a ransom, if need be, for the lives of others. And we can only do that if we stop fearing death so much, and stop thinking of ourselves as masters of the universe.

How do we do that? Carl Gregg, who wrote this week’s The Hardest Question blog post, suggests an answer. He quotes Richard Rohr, who says this:

Once we have learned to discern the real, disguised nature of both good and evil, we recognize that everything is broken and fallen, weak and poor, while still being the dwelling place of God — you and me, your country, your children, your churches, even your marriage. That is not a put-down, but finally a freedom to love imperfect things! As Jesus told the rich young man, ‘God alone is good!’ (Mark 10:18). In this, you may have been given the greatest recipe for happiness for the rest of your life. You cannot wait for things to be totally perfect to fall in love with them or you will never love anything. Now, instead, you can love everything.

When we think about what it means to be truly human, it’s not excitable visions of the future that should draw us. It’s not the hope that some technological improvement or new way of thinking about the universe will finally make us perfect. It’s the fact that we have a chance to love the imperfect, here and now. Just as Jesus did. God loved imperfect humanity so much that he came down from heaven and dwelled among us. To teach us how to be good, but also to teach us that our goodness depends on our ability to love imperfections. Jesus turns to Peter and chastises him: “Get behind me, Satan!” But he never stops loving Peter, imperfect as he is. Because to be human is to be immersed in life, invested in it, here and now.

John Cassian

February 28, 2012February 28, 2012 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

John Cassian was only twenty years old when he set off to Bethlehem with his friend Germanus. Germanus was older, although how much older is unknown. I imagine that John was a pious and enthusiastic young man, attracted, like many were, by the stories of monasticism, especially Egyptian monasticism, that circulated in his native Scythia. Justo Gonzalez says that there were, at one time, more than 20,000 people living as monks and nuns in one region of the Egyptian desert alone. Many of the people who showed up at the monasteries, hoping to live as desert ascetics, needed to be baptized first, since the allure of monasticism was so powerful that even pagans were drawn to it. But John and Germanus went to Bethlehem before they went to Egypt. They lived there for five years, sharing a cell and a life of prayer and devotion. It was there that they met a fugitive abbot from Egypt, one Pinufius, who had fled from the administrative tasks of his position. Still, he must have spoken in glowing terms about life in the desert. When his fellow monks showed up to take him back to Egypt (and it’s hard not to imagine this as a comic scene), he left John and Germanus in a state of eagerness to follow.

John and Germanus were very popular in Bethlehem. Their fellow monks made them promise to return there after they’d gone to Egypt, and they did, but only for a short visit after seven years. And when they had fulfilled this obligation, they scooted right back to the Egyptian desert. What made life in the desert so attractive to so many people? To begin with, this was an uncertain time for the Roman Empire. Visigothic invasions were rendering things unstable. And the establishment of Christianity as the state religion was changing the daily practices of Christians and leading people to seek power in a way that was far removed from the apostolic ideal. The monks represented a purity movement. They were pioneers at the far reaches of habitable land, and pioneers in the far reaches of the soul.

They lived either as hermits or in communities. If hermits, they lived by themselves, although within walking distance of other hermits, whom they would gather together with on Sundays for church. They cultivated small patches of land and wove baskets, singing psalms and reciting scripture as they worked. They ate mostly bread, owned almost nothing, and slept on rough mats, which John Cassian found sufficiently comfortable. If the monks lived in communities, they lived in walled enclosures that were divided into many small buildings, which included a church, a meeting hall, a storehouse, and a refectory. Everyone shared in performing even the humblest tasks, and they prayed ceaselessly as they did so. Whether they lived as hermits or in communities, most of the desert monks were illiterate. This meant that the scripture they learned was memorized and spoken aloud with great frequency, so that others could memorize it.

John Cassian was not illiterate. He was fluent in two languages, Latin and Greek. And as he went among the desert fathers, he recorded their sayings. It’s because of him that we know so much about their spirituality. Its clear from the discussions that he and Germanus had with the monks that the men and women who lived in the desert were seeking purity of heart above all else. Abbot Moses puts it best. The ultimate goal of a Christian is to live within the Kingdom of God. But human beings need more concrete, less idealistic goals to aim for in our everyday lives. The metaphor that Moses uses is that of an archer. If one wants to learn marksmanship, it doesn’t do any good to shoot arrows into the blank sky. One needs to shoot at a target that is visible. Purity of heart, for the monks and nuns, was the visible target. We might find this to be a fairly idealistic goal in itself, but the desert fathers and mothers lived in a way that made it attainable to them.

At least some of the time. Because they were isolated and largely illiterate, they weren’t always aware of what was going on in the wider world of Christianity. Ideas that the church councils had rejected still drifted among them, and gained traction. And because the monks lived in a way that was considered more holy than the sophisticated, city dwelling Christians’ say of life, they couldn’t understand why decisions made by those urban Christian councils should trump their own understanding of orthodox faith. In 399 A.D., the theological divisions between the monks and the bishops exploded, and monks who held Origenist views were driven out of Egypt. Origenists believed in the pre-existence of the soul and that Christ would restore everything when he came again, rescuing even those parts of creation that had been proven to be evil. John and Germanus apparently sympathized with this point of view, or were at least disheartened to see the persecution of the monks, because they left Egypt in that year and went to Constantinople to seek refuge from John Chrysostom.

But John Chrysostom had problems of his own. He was in a life and death struggle with the Imperial family, and although he paused in his struggles to ordain John as a deacon, it wasn’t long before he was exiled and sent on the enforced march that took his life. But before Chrysostom died in his own wilderness he sent John and Germanus to plead his case before the Bishop of Rome. They never went back. In fact, at this moment Germanus disappears from John Cassian’s life. We don’t know if he died or if they simply parted ways. The next eleven years of John’s biography are a blank. John, the most private and reticent of men, didn’t return to the attention of other people until 415 A.D., when he went to Massilia (present day Marseilles) to found a monastery of his own. It was there, during the next ten years, that he wrote the two books that he is famous for. The first was The Institutes, which create a rule of life for his monks to live by. The second was The Conferences, which recorded his conversations with the desert fathers so long ago.

Why was John so shy of talking about himself? It puzzles historians, who look to the example of Augustine and sigh, wishing that John had been more like him. But John wasn’t just self-effacing. He may have been wounded by the Origenist controversy, and hurt by what happened to John Chrysostom. Seeing the end effects of the church’s political and theological disputes may have convinced him to stay out of them. Still, I think there’s more to it than that. If John truly believed what he reported in The Conferences, then what was the merit of his going into details of his life? He didn’t want to do anything for human glory, or lay up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume. He was seeking purity of heart, with the ultimate goal of living within the Kingdom of God. When he was convinced to enter into a controversy, by writing a series of tracts that were opposed to the Nestorians, he failed miserably. It’s hard to imagine that he had much enthusiasm for the task. He was content to live at Massilia with his monks, and the rule of life that they established there had more influence than any theological argument he ever made in a public dispute. Saint Benedict would read his Institutes a hundred years later, and use them as the basis for creating the Benedictine rule.

Further Reading

Cassian, John, Colm Luibhéid, and Eugène Pichery. Conferences. New York: Paulist, 1985. Print.

González, Justo L. The Story of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. Print.

Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.

Blessed Voyagers

February 25, 2012April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Mark’s story of Jesus’s baptism is like a storm front. The brightness of the baptism and the descent of the dove is met, almost immediately, by the darkness of the temptation in the wilderness, and the whole story seems to exist in that liminal space where warm air meets cold air and a storm begins to brew. It’s unsettling to have baptism and temptation so close together. It seems to bring the very nature of baptism into question. If baptism is meant to make us into new people, to free us from our sins and fill us with Christ, then what is it doing in such close proximity to temptation and emptiness? It’s as if Mark is telling us to be wary of any pleasant theology of baptism, any belief that after baptism everything in life will be good and easy.

In Mark, baptism doesn’t automatically make the world anew. And this is more true, I think, than any hope that we can become new people in one moment, through the completion of one act. In the past week I’ve heard two people describe churches that seem to be happiness-centered. These churches seem to believe that becoming a Christian should free one of all doubts and that baptism is a way out of sorrow. Because of this, they get impatient with doubt, but more than that, they refuse to admit to their own occasional sorrows. They believe that admitting to sorrow is the same thing as not trusting in God.

But in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus trusts God and is brought immediately into a wilderness of sorrow and temptation, as if the true sign of trusting God is a willingness to be sent anywhere, into any domain of loss or joy. If that’s true, then what is God up to in baptism? What is baptism supposed to be, or do? How is it supposed to help us? Again, it was my friend Laurie who provided the answer. She suggested that baptism is a blessing – that God prepares us for life as a Christian, not by transforming us utterly, but by blessing us so that we can experience that full transformation in the minutiae of every day, in spiritual quests that can take years, if not lifetimes. Baptism prepares us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase Saint Paul. It affirms that the wildernesses are navigable with the aid of God’s blessing.

And the truth is that the wildernesses are really amazing. The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness as a kind of pioneer. He’ll struggle with demons and defeat them, and reclaim the wilderness for human use. This is what the desert fathers (Saint Anthony, Saint Symeon Stylites, Saint Martin of Tours) were doing when they went into their own wildernesses. They were reclaiming the spiritual landscape and making it fertile. With the blessing of God, they didn’t hesitate to venture into any combat, and found their demons in odd and surprising places, but by finding and defeating them, reclaimed those places for us.

If anything, the proximity of Jesus’ baptism to his wilderness sojourn should be a clarion call to our own pioneering spirits. Enter the wilderness, with God’s blessings, and transform it. I had a moment of serendipity when I was thinking about the pioneering spirit this week. I was listening to Radiolab (a terrific podcast which you can find here), and they had a story about Voyager 1 & 2, the two exploratory spacecraft that NASA launched in 1977. For the past thirty-five years they have been moving through the solar system, photographing the planets and taking measurements. Much of what we now know about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune is due to the work of these two little unmanned ships. Their cameras were turned off on Valentine’s Day, 1990, but before they were, they turned back and took one last picture of earth, which from that distance was nothing but a pale blue dot against the backdrop of a band of solar light. To quote Carl Sagan, that dot represents: “Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, ever superstar, every corrupt politician, everyone in all of history, everyone, the sum total. Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.”

That’s part of the wilderness that the Voyager spacecrafts have already reclaimed for us. Against the immense backdrop of space, our petty ambitions are put in devastating perspective. If we are to thrust ourselves into wildernesses of ambition, we will never be able to do so again in the full believe that we’re engaged in an important cosmic act. We are small, the picture tells us. We should act humbly.

Fourteen years after taking that picture, the two spacecraft reached the edge of the solar system. The solar wind died away, but readings sent back to NASA revealed that the ships weren’t out of the solar system yet. They were still caught in the magnetic fields of the sun. So they are in a liminal place, not quite in the solar system and not quite out of it. It’s like they are traveling through the shell of an egg. Scientists call this place the “stagnation layer.” Voyager 1 & 2 could move beyond it any day now. When they do, they will be the first human made objects to leave the solar system, and move into the far greater wilderness of interstellar space. Who knows what they will be able to reclaim from that wilderness, what they will show us and teach us as they move ever onward.

When we are in our own private wildernesses, it may feel like we’re trapped in stagnation layers. Whatever lessons we have to learn, whatever tasks we have to complete, seem impossible, and sometimes even forgotten. And we may feel like we’re in a storm front, buffeted about by spiritual combat, fighting our own demons and the demons of the world. How do we live in stagnation layers and storm fronts? That is largely up to us. But God has given us a gift that will bring us through them. As we sit, stagnate, waiting, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us. As we battle, are wounded, and struggle within ourselves, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us. We have been blessed and sent out as pioneers, reclaiming spiritual space in our souls and moral space in the world for God, and in those moments when the struggles of the wilderness might seem overwhelming, we only need to remember the descent of the dove.

Ash Wednesday

February 20, 2012April 16, 2012 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I read T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash-Wednesday every year, right before the day itself. I used to read it so that I’d be stimulated to deep and important thoughts, as a kind of crib sheet for writing a meaningful sermon about the day. But lately I read it for itself. As a poem, it sometimes feels and functions as if it were a liturgy. It leads me into a place of prayer and readiness, a preparation for the season that’s at hand.

I’m not going to write a literary analysis here, or pretend that I can create anything as beautiful and evocative as the poem itself. But I do want to offer some thoughts on it, informed, as always, by some supplementary reading. But first, here’s a place where you can go and read the poem if you’d like: Ash-Wednesday.

The poem opens on a note of deep melancholy, in a mood of surrender. All the old ambitions of our lives, the hope we had, get worn out, and we notice their passing without the energy to mourn it, because if we still had energy we would be using it to keep those ambitions alive. Envy dies with ambition, but there’s a loss even in this, since we don’t know who we are once we stop being envious, desiring creatures. And often that envy was the engine of our ambitions, our hopes for ourselves and our place in the world. But “why should I mourn the vanished power of the usual reign?” Eliot is talking about more than just the personal, here. The reign might be the whole secular world and it’s effects on the individual. When our desire to succeed in that world dies, so does that world’s power. But there’s no celebration in the desire not to mourn it’s passing. Only resignation. Only a long sigh.

But this melancholy extends even beyond the passing cares of the secular world. There’s a real fear of the absence of grace: “Because I know I shall not know the one veritable transitory power.” If that power is grace, which some of the commentaries I read suggest, than the poem’s speaker seems to be denying the possibility of grace. Or maybe he’s just denying his power to summon it, the arrogance of believing that we can make our own grace. But what follows make the first meaning more likely. The speaker rejects the possibility of grace, because “time is always time/And place is always and only place.” Only the actual world matters, but that actuality is tragically limited – “What is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place.” If the actual is all that there is, then we can’t move beyond it to a hoped for future or any vision of a better world.

Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical companion to T.S. Eliot: a literary reference to his life and work, points out that Eliot was drawing from Dante and Guido Cavalcanti as he wrote the poem, and that both of these Florentine poets worked in the troubadour or courtly love tradition. The idea of courtly love is a lost one in this day and age. A troubadour would fall in love with a woman from a distance, and never let the woman know that he was in love with her. In her ignorance, she would act in the way anyone would act, falling in love with other people, slighting her unknown lover unintentionally, inflicting dozens of psychic wounds in ignorance. And the silent troubadour would bear with all of this, because it was training in love, ultimately in our love for God. God can seem as distant and mysterious as any woman who a troubadour might choose as the object of his love. God will act in ways that might seem indifferent to our desires, if not our needs. Ash-Wednesday is, oddly, a poem that works obliquely in this courtly love tradition. The Lady in Part II is akin to Dante’s Beatrice. But I wonder if she isn’t also “the blessed face” of Part I, who the poet rejects, he’s so far sunk into despair.

Which makes the Lady’s reappearance at the beginning of Part II feel like quite a relief, even it’s accompanied by the image of “three white leopards… under a juniper-tree/In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety/On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained/In the hollow round of my skull.” This is the motion of the poem so far, from materialistic despair to a possibility of hope in our ability to learn and practice a strange kind of love. A love for the divine which is akin to courtly love, self-sacrificial and often flirting with the possibility that the object of our love doesn’t know of our existence. But this is also the movement of the day itself, of Ash Wednesday. We remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. The full, horrible, limiting fact of our material existence is blatantly stated, and for that moment when we have the ashes put on our forehead, we may really feel it, entirely know that it’s true, that all we are is dust.

But neither the poem nor the liturgy leaves us in that state. The speaker in the poem must go through a harrowing of the flesh, a purgation of the body, which can’t be unfamiliar to readers of the spiritual classics. The rest of the poem, in fact, moves in a way that is oddly akin to Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle or John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. Particularly in the poem’s third section, where the speaker engages in movement up a staircase that resembles Teresa’s movement from room to room in her castle. He is being drawn closer and closer to God. And the liturgy moves in a similar fashion. After the imposition of ashes the people read the 51st Psalm, in which they beg – “Purge me from my sin, and I shall be pure; wash me, and I shall be clean indeed.” They then recite the Litany of Penitence, and are absolved. The service moves from the acknowledgment of our material nothingness, to a request for purification and the spiritual struggle of penitence, to restoration. So does Eliot’s poem, that restoration appearing so beautiful in Part IV: “restoring/One who moves in the time between sleep and waking.”

But neither the liturgy nor the poem end in restoration. Both move into communion. The God who has been the object of our courtly love is proven to be aware of us, and more than aware. Dante, when he wrote The Divine Comedy, used Beatrice as his spiritual guide. The historical Beatrice was the object of his courtly love, but she remained ignorant of it, as any object of courtly love should. But the Beatrice in his poem is his spiritual guide. So God is our guide, present to us in our spiritual pilgrimage in a way that may sometimes seem obscure in our physical pilgrimage on this earth. At the end of his poem, Eliot comes back to what, for me, our the most powerful lines of Part I: “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still.” Only now our stillness is not the result of despair, but the result of total and immersive love. Our calm is not the indifference of hopelessness, but the revelation of a deep peace.

“The full purpose of the tadpole has been revealed in the frog.”

February 17, 2012April 16, 2012 ~ KPB Stevens ~ 6 Comments

Mike Baughman, who writes for The Hardest Question, suggests that what we call transfiguration is actually metamorphosis (metamorpho being the Greek that we translate as “transfiguration”). If that’s so, than the story of Jesus on Mount Tabor is the same story that tadpoles and caterpillars enact in nature. Jesus undergoes a metamorphosis. His divinity is revealed. But Mike wisely points out that this doesn’t mean that his nature is transformed. The caterpillar and the butterfly share the same DNA – they are the same creature. Metamorphosis isn’t about becoming something entirely different. It’s about the revelation of a different form within a single being. As Mike so eloquently puts it, “the full purpose of the tadpole has been revealed in the frog.”

I was talking to my friend Laurie about this as we planned our weekly sermons. Transfiguration is metamorphosis, but what does that mean? And how can one construct a sermon out of that single thought? Laurie, of course, knew where to go with the idea. There’s a reason we read the Transfiguration story before the beginning of Lent, she said. Think of what’s happening on Mount Tabor. Jesus undergoes a metamorphosis, right there before Peter, James and John. They see his full purpose revealed. But transfiguration isn’t a central moment in Christian life. The revelation of purpose isn’t enough. The fulfillment of purpose is, and that happens at the resurrection. Peter, James and John find themselves looking at the resurrection Christ before resurrection has taken place. He won’t look like this again until Easter morning. In fact, despite Peter’s entreaties, he’ll return to the way he looked before, to his tadpole or caterpillar state, and walk with them down the mountain. So transfiguration isn’t an end in itself (neither, I suppose, is metamorphosis in nature, at least not to a religious person, who believes that things have purposes beyond their material existence on earth).

Laurie came up with the best metaphor for this. After butterflies and moths hatch from their cocoons, they need to spend time spreading their wings and allowing them to dry. She reminded me about the passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. When Dillard was a little girl, a friend found a Polyphemus moth cocoon, and their teacher put it in a mason jar after the children had passed it around, the heat from their hands having stimulated the moth inside into thinking that spring had arrived. The moth emerged in the mason jar, alive and powerful, but

He couldn’t spread his wings. There was no room. The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried, and hardened his wings as they were. He was a monster in a mason jar. Those huge wings stuck on his back in a torture of random pleats and folds, wrinkled as a dirty tissue, rigid as leather. They made a single nightmare clump still racked with useless, frantic convulsions.

Perhaps, Laurie suggested, that is why we read about the Transfiguration right before Lent. It reminds us of what we are eventually meant to become – creatures whose true natures are revealed in a new shape, a new purpose. But it also reminds us that we have to let our wings dry into the proper shape. Lent is like the lifting of the mason jar. All the things that press about us are sent away, so that we can dry into the new shape that we, and the world, will fully assume at Easter.

But what are we going to become, eventually? What is that new shape that we’re reaching for? Whatever it is, the metaphor of metamorphosis tells us that it won’t be a complete break from the past. The tadpole and the frog, the caterpillar and the moth, are the same creature. The seed of our resurrection selves are right here, inside our present selves. To me, this means that we can never neglect or denigrate the past. When we think of our pasts, many of us find much to be ashamed of. Yet it’s a mistake to think that the events of the past disappear in the moment of resurrection. Our pasts aren’t vanquished on Easter morning. They are redeemed. Our scrabbly, slimy former selves are brought into a new kind of beauty.

And this, too, is part of the purpose of Lent. As we pause, allowing ourselves to dry so that the new shape that we’re assuming can form itself without deformation, we can think about our pasts, and how they formed our spirits. We can look at and consider those things that are most painful to us, most shameful. When I was in seminary and struggling with my own shame over my past, my favorite professor asked me a simple question. “Back when you were that person, did anyone love you?” I had to answer yes. “Were they idiots?” he asked. “Were they fools?” I had to answer no. “Then they loved you because they saw something good in you,” he said, “even if you couldn’t see it yourself.” That, for me, was the path to redemption. Realizing that the full purpose of the tadpole is revealed in the frog, that when I was a tadpole, slimy and silent in my own misery, the spirit within me was moving inexorably towards metamorphosis, towards my own transfiguration.